D0cking could have gone worse, Tori supposed.

It started smoothly enough, with the autopilot bringing them right alongside the Huan Xiang Zhou.

After that, things became much more complicated. The autopilot did a lousy job lining their airlock up to the one on the other ship, and they didn’t do much better manually. Tori and Gabe took turns, and Mr. Gao coached them, but it still took four attempts over seven hours to get them perfectly lined up.

That’s when they discovered that the two airlocks weren’t compatible. They could hold the two ships together with magnetic cables, and they could string a guide wire from one ot the other, but they couldn’t establish a pressurized corridor between them. Not without months or years of work, and more engineering knowledge than To...

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